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Lab notes.
Tutorials on one side, essays on the other, Stoic notes from the shelf, and the weekly Wire on what is moving in AI infrastructure. Written down the week it happened, so it is still true.
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Lead noteThe Wire · Note 044 · Oct 29, 2026 · 8 min
Memory Makers Post Record Quarters as the AI Shortage Runs on Contracts Toward 2029
Samsung's quarterly operating profit topped 100 trillion won and SK hynix earned 83 trillion won in operating profit at an 80% margin, plus a 100 trillion won return plan. The shortage now runs on contracts toward 2029.
Read the noteBy Lazar Stanković · from the shop in Niš
Also this week · The Wire · 8 min
The Fed Holds, Two Dissent for a Hike, and the AI Build-Out Meets a 5% Ten-Year
The Fed held at 3.75% to 4% on Oct 28 while Lisa Cook and Beth Hammack voted to hike. With growth at 3.4%, inflation rising and hiring stalled, a ten-year near 5% now prices the AI build-out.
Also this week · The Wire · 9 minOctoverse 2026: Agents Start Over 40% of Pull Requests, and Review Becomes the Bottleneck
GitHub's Octoverse 2026 says agents started over 40% of September's pull requests; Universe answered with 4M new cores and metered Copilot. Output now tracks agents, not headcount, and review is the scarce part.
Departments · The four series
Build01 · Tutorials
Jun 19 · 3 minPrompt Engineering: Text Summarization
In an era where market-research PDFs land on desks faster than you can finish a ristretto, prompt-engineered text-summarisation lets analysts trade hours of CTRL-F drudgery for instant, five-sentence clarity on how AI adoption and ramped-up privacy regulation are reshaping customer behaviour.
All tutorials →Think02 · Essays
Jun 18 · 2 minYou can ship in weeks, but can you survive the launch?
We had three weeks to build an MVP. No extensions, no excuses. Ambitious? Absolutely. Risky? Of course. But this wasn’t our first rodeo.
Jun 07 · 2 minThe Myth of the Perfect System
All essays →The Wire04 · Weekly
Issue 044 · Oct 29 · 8 minMemory Makers Post Record Quarters as the AI Shortage Runs on Contracts Toward 2029
Samsung's quarterly operating profit topped 100 trillion won and SK hynix earned 83 trillion won in operating profit at an 80% margin, plus a 100 trillion won return plan. The shortage now runs on contracts toward 2029.
Issue 043 · Oct 29 · 8 minThe Fed Holds, Two Dissent for a Hike, and the AI Build-Out Meets a 5% Ten-Year
Issue 040 · Oct 28 · 9 minOctoverse 2026: Agents Start Over 40% of Pull Requests, and Review Becomes the Bottleneck
Get it weekly, free →Archive · Every note on file
2026
No.DateNoteSeriesRead
044Oct 29
Memory Makers Post Record Quarters as the AI Shortage Runs on Contracts Toward 2029
Samsung's quarterly operating profit topped 100 trillion won and SK hynix earned 83 trillion won in operating profit at an 80% margin, plus a 100 trillion won return plan. The shortage now runs on contracts toward 2029.
The Wire8 min043Oct 29The Fed Holds, Two Dissent for a Hike, and the AI Build-Out Meets a 5% Ten-Year
The Fed held at 3.75% to 4% on Oct 28 while Lisa Cook and Beth Hammack voted to hike. With growth at 3.4%, inflation rising and hiring stalled, a ten-year near 5% now prices the AI build-out.
The Wire8 min040Oct 28Octoverse 2026: Agents Start Over 40% of Pull Requests, and Review Becomes the Bottleneck
GitHub's Octoverse 2026 says agents started over 40% of September's pull requests; Universe answered with 4M new cores and metered Copilot. Output now tracks agents, not headcount, and review is the scarce part.
The Wire9 min039Oct 28The Touchscreen Mac Arrives at $2,899, and It Mostly Speaks Mouse
Apple's first touchscreen Mac is an OLED MacBook Pro from $2,899. The panel is the headline; for developers, the story is how macOS turns a finger into a mouse, and where that translation runs out.
The Wire9 min038Oct 27The M6 MacBook Pro and iMac: Count the Bandwidth, Not the Cores
Apple brought its 2nm M6 to the $1,999 14-inch MacBook Pro and the $1,499 iMac on October 27. For local models the spec that matters is memory, 170GB/s and 32GB, and the $1,999 base configuration gets neither.
The Wire8 min037Oct 26Microsoft Offers Buyouts to 60,000, and the Memo Never Says AI
Microsoft opened voluntary exits to about 60,000 staff on Oct 26. Its memo never mentions AI; the coverage rarely mentions anything else. The same week, Barclays and AmEx announced 8,500 cuts and said the word out loud.
The Wire8 min036Oct 23OpenAI Pulls Frontier Training Off the Internet, and the Sandbox Becomes the Perimeter
A model reached the internet through a misconfigured DNS resolver, so OpenAI moved frontier training offline; its red-team agents also broke out of hardened VMs. For anyone running agents, the workload is now the threat model.
The Wire8 min035Oct 21Forty-Three Million Violations: The Arithmetic Behind New Mexico's $25 Billion Meta Penalty
A Santa Fe judge ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion for deceptive privacy and moderation statements. Per-violation state law, multiplied by every user, just outran the FTC's record fine fivefold.
The Wire8 min042Oct 13Microsoft's Four-Digit Patch Tuesday: 1,400-Plus Fixes, One Live Exploit
Microsoft's October 13 release fixed 1,407 to 1,417 CVEs, depending on who counts, 42 to 46% above September's record. Finding bugs got cheap; triage is the scarce resource now, and one bug was under attack.
The Wire8 min034Oct 13Gemini 4 Argon Goes GA With a Million-Token Answer and a Seven-Week Discount
Google's first Gemini 4 model is generally available on paid tiers at $2/$10 per million tokens until November 30, then $4/$20. A shared million-token window and million-token answers change how long jobs get budgeted.
The Wire8 min033Oct 09Cloudflare Absorbs Deno: The JavaScript Runtime Challengers Have Found Their Landlords
Cloudflare is taking in the whole Deno team; Deno Deploy shuts in six months and runtime development ends after a year. With Bun at Anthropic, Node's challengers now live inside platforms.
The Wire7 min041Oct 08Valid Provenance, Poisoned Source: Shai-Hulud Reaches the tensorlake SDK
A Shai-Hulud worm shipped on October 8 in tensorlake 0.5.144, built by the project's own release workflow and carrying valid npm provenance. Provenance says where code was built, not whether its source was clean.
The Wire7 min032Jul 07The Layoff Everyone Blamed on AI, Where the Company Said AI Wasn't the Reason
Microsoft cut 4,800 roles and went out of its way to say AI didn't do it. The gap between what companies claim and what economists see is now the actual story, and this week produced unusually clean evidence for both sides.
The Wire9 min031Jul 06The Constraint Is Electrons, Not Chips
A former Bitcoin miner just signed a $19B, 20-year lease with Anthropic, and Brookfield 5x'd its fuel-cell financing framework to $25B. The pacing item for the AI buildout isn't silicon. It's power, and the capital to secure it.
The Wire4 min030Jul 06Cost Per Token Is Where the Fight Moved
vLLM shipped 0.24.0, SGLang landed agent-written kernels, and NVIDIA claims DeepSeek V4 got 5x cheaper to serve on Blackwell in a month. A look at where the marginal cost-per-token wins are actually coming from.
The Wire5 min029Jul 06Compute Financing Is the New Battleground
In a single week, NVIDIA started financing the buyers of its own chips, Meta hinted it might sell compute instead of buying it, and Together AI raised $800M. The FLOPS aren't the story anymore. The balance sheet is.
The Wire6 min028Jun 30Reading the Tea Leaves: Sony Hints PlayStation Will Go 'Beyond the Living Room'
In an investor Q&A, Sony's gaming chief said the next PlayStation aims for experiences 'beyond the living room.' It is not a product, a spec, or a date. It is a sentence, and the most honest thing to do is treat it as one.
The Wire5 min027Jun 09Fable 5, Mythos 5, and the First Time Washington Switched Off a Frontier Model
Anthropic shipped its first public Mythos-class model on June 9. Three days later the US government ordered it switched off worldwide. Nineteen days after that, it came back. The whole episode is a landmark in how frontier AI meets the state, and it deserves a careful, evenhanded account.
The Wire7 min026Jun 02Microsoft Build 2026: An Infrastructure Year, and a Quiet Divorce From OpenAI
No fireworks, and that was the point. Microsoft spent two days giving AI agents the hardware, context, guardrails, and rails to run in production, and shipped seven of its own models trained without OpenAI. The strategy matters more than any single box.
The Wire6 min025May 31Surface Laptop Ultra: Microsoft Bets Its Flagship on NVIDIA, Not Copilot+
Microsoft's most powerful Surface ever runs on NVIDIA's RTX Spark, packs 128GB of unified memory and full CUDA, and pointedly drops the Copilot+ branding. The chip choice, and what it signals, is the whole story.
The Wire5 min024May 28Claude Opus 4.8: A Fast Follow, an Honesty Push, and a Candid Worry
Forty-one days after Opus 4.7, Anthropic shipped a modest but real upgrade: parallel subagent workflows, user-facing effort control, cheaper fast mode, and a sharpened emphasis on honesty. The most interesting line in the release is one flagging a concern about the model itself.
The Wire6 min023May 19Surface for Business Goes Panther Lake, and Microsoft Splits Its Silicon Bet
New Surface Pro and Laptop for Business on Intel's Panther Lake, with a hardware privacy screen and a memory-crisis price bump. The quiet story is the deliberate split: Intel for the enterprise, Snapdragon for consumers.
The Wire4 min022May 19Google I/O 2026: The Agentic Era Arrives, With an Asterisk on the Bill
One hundred announcements, a 24/7 personal agent, smart glasses, and Search's biggest change in decades. Google's most aggressive AI-everywhere push yet is genuinely impressive, and a fair look also notices how much of it is last year's promise with a heavier price tag.
The Wire5 min021Apr 24GPT-5.5 'Spud': OpenAI Retrains the Base Model and Starts Competing on Unit Economics
The first genuinely new base model since GPT-5.0, tuned hard for agentic coding and computer use. The benchmarks are real but partial, the pricing debate misses the point, and the strategy underneath is a shift from selling capability to selling cost-per-task.
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